In this essay, Bilderfahrzeuge Speaker Professor Andreas Beyer traces the origins of an integral element of contemporary art theory – the possibility of an intellectual and theoretical discourse based entirely on images – ‘art speaking for itself’.

He finds these in the Blaue Reiter almanac of 1912, in which Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc juxtaposed images of seemingly entirely heterogeneous art works – such as Robert Delaunay’s Tour Eiffel (1911) and El Greco’s St John the Baptist (1605) in the form of a purely visual essay which allowed pictures to communicate with other pictures.

Examining in particular the motivation and reasoning behind this highly innovative format, he draws a parallel to Aby Warburg’s methodology and the visual rhetoric developed both in his teaching practices and his unfinished magnum opus: the Mnemosyne Atlas.

The exhibition “Kandinsky, Marc & Der Blaue Reiter” is on show at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, from 4 September 4 2016 until 22 January 2017.

For more information on the exhibition, please visit the website of Fondation Beyeler.